In Search of Mayonnaise
While I was teaching in Jinan, Shandong Province, I got the idea one late spring day to make with my students some potato salad as part of an American-style meal. Since I didn't want to risk using raw eggs to make mayonnaise from scratch, which I'd never done anyway, I recruited a student to help me explore the city of over 1 million to find some in a store.

Sometimes during my years teaching in China, I'd go on such food expeditions with some of my students and Chinese colleagues. This was to give them some idea of food typically eaten in the US. In Zhengzhou, for example, a student once reported seeing peanut butter in a downtown department store. Although I normally ate Chinese food, I think that I was actually excited by that news, so a few of us went there after class. The peanut butter was in jars similar to what's found in the US, but I discovered that the jar I'd bought was flavored with hot pepper. I'd not noticed the small stamp in Chinese on the label indicating that it was hot. Then on, I was sure to request the sweet kind.

At each store in Jinan, we usually had trouble trying to describe mayonnaise, for the translation in the dictionary wasn't a common term, at least back then, and I was the only one who had ever eaten any. Each time the store clerk eventually said, "沒有."
[For those who don't know Chinese, go to this page for a translation and click on the word on the left side with a little arrow next to it for the audio clip: http://mandarin.about.com/od/dailymandarin/a/meiyou.htm]